2005 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – THE INCREDIBLES

The Incredibles is the first Pixar movie (and the first Disney movie) to win the Hugo (through three of their five previous had been nominated), the first fully animated film, and the first superhero film. The rise of computer animation over the past decade is so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning, and we’ve already discussed superheroic domination of the summer blockbuster. The Hugos have sort of resisted these trends in their winners, but I guess the combination proved undeniable.

Mr. Incredible, one of America’s greatest superheroes, has a series of misadventures on his way to a wedding with another superhero, Elastigirl. He saves the day, but along the way he alienates the president of his fan club by denying him a sidekick role, and he wracks up a couple of lawsuits from a prevented suicide and a train crash. This opens a pandora’s box of superhero liability, and eventually the government steps in to pay legal fees in exchange for the superhero community going into collective retirement. Years later, Incredible and Elastigirl have settled into typical suburban lives. Their daughter can turn invisible and their son is superfast, but they try to prevent their children from using their powers in order to keep their cover. Mr. Incredible is restless though, and he jumps at a chance to do a special job fighting a robot on an isolated island. He gets back into the game, commissioning a new costume, but then uncovers a supervillain’s plot that draws his whole super-family into action.

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon or a contrarian, I don’t like this movie as much as everyone else I know. Let me be clear, I like it. I like it a lot. I just don’t love it. It’s closer to the bottom of my personal Pixar rankings…which still puts it above most movies out there. I have two big problems of varying degrees of nitpickiness. Nitpickiest first: there’s a big part of me that wishes this were a Fantastic Four movie. The powers, and a lot of the set up, are straight out of the epic, genius sixties superhero-family comics of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The similarities are numerous enough to bother me (and the FF movies are awful – so unfair), but I know I should just get over this. My second problem, which I think is a more legitimate issue, is that the political message is really weird. Writer/director Brad Bird is claiming that society forces exceptional people to hide their talents, which feels a lot like a straw man to me. I don’t really see this problem in the world. The villain’s grudge is that he doesn’t have powers, and one of his threats is that he’ll distribute his magnificent inventions to the people to put them on par with people with superpowers. The inventions themselves seem to negate his grudge and keeping technology from the masses just so powered people can feel their full specialness just seems petty. I really don’t get it. I’m probably thinking about it a lot harder than I’m supposed to.

While I’m complaining about a universally beloved film, I’ll go all in and add that the animation is showing its age a bit. It looks fantastic, but the limits if the character animation and the static nature of some of the backgrounds go a long way to showing how quickly computer animation advances. It’s still dazzling and gorgeous, but more recent Pixar pics are even moreso.

Okay, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I will say this is a very fun movie, and one of the best superhero films of all time. It does look great, despite being long-in-the-tooth in computer animation terms, and the character dynamics are interesting and rich. I would say that Eternal Sunshine should have won, and I also prefer Prisoner of Azkaban and Spider-Man 2. But these are four great films (the fifth nominee Sky Captain…not so much), so I’m not really complaining.

Grade: B+

2011 Hugo Nominee: Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - Toy Story 3, screenplay by Michael Arndt; directed by Lee Unkrich (Pixar/Disney)

I should just cut and paste my review of Up from last year. As with that film, this is another fantastic work of art from Pixar that moved me more than most of the films I saw last year. Yet, I’m hard-pressed to call this speculative fiction. Again, I don’t really know why. The fantasy element of talking toys is fairly obvious, and I don’t really have the same problem with the two Pixar movies that did win Hugos, The Incredibles and Wall-E. Oh, those fuzzy genre lines.

It always feels dumb to do the plot synopses for the films that I know everyone reading this has seen. Anyway, toys talk and go on adventures when you’re not looking. They live for the pleasure of their owners, and, as we learned in the first two films, they have abandonment issues when their owner plays with a new toy more, or when he or she grows out of playing with toys, as happened to cowgirl Jessie in Toy Story 2. Cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and space ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) are the unofficial leaders of the toys of a boy named Andy who’s about to head off to college. The toys are preparing themselves for the limbo of the attic, but Andy’s Mom accidentally gives the toys to a daycare, where they are horribly mutilated by kids. A group of daycare-veteran toys, led by Lots-O’-Huggin-Bear (Ned Beatty), run the daycare as a fascist dictatorship, and soon Andy’s toys have to mount a daring escape. This is the film’s best sequence, and it culminates in some very dramatic scenes. Honestly, despite everything I know about Pixar and the target audience of this film, they still had me convinced, for a few seconds at least, that the toys were all going to die a horrible death. That’s how good they are as storytellers.

I read an essay by Michael Chabon recently where he condemned the first film for making a villain out of the kid who tortured and disassembled his toys. I’ve also read a review condemning the film for portraying the toys as happy slaves. These are actually pretty well-thought out essays (at least the Chabon one is), but they mostly just point to the silliness in taking the premise too seriously. I think maybe that’s where we can draw that genre line. There’s nothing speculative about sentient toys. It’s not a thought-experiment (though the daycare prison-camp mafia comes closer than anything else in the franchise before). It is a set of metaphors for friendship and aging. You can, and probably will, take the character relationships seriously, and if you’re anything like me, those will resonate with you on an emotional level, but you shouldn’t really pay much mind to the premise. That right there is how I justify my own gut reaction that this isn’t really in the Hugo wheelhouse. But, it still is a great film. Unlike last year, however, I do think that there is another Hugo-nominated film that I would take over the Pixar movie, with or without genre constraints.

Grade: A

2011 Hugo Nominee: Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, directed by Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (DreamWorks)

Pixar has pretty much cornered the market on making moving, brilliant, beautiful, all ages computer animated films. I’m pretty sure that this is the best non-Pixar, feature length computer animated film I’ve seen though. Yeah, that’s a lot of qualifiers, but it was certainly a pleasant surprise after some really inane commercials during the 2010 Winter Olympics convinced me not to see this in the theater.

The movie takes place in a Viking village under siege by dragon attacks. The dragons come in different breeds with different power sets, which feels a bit like a Pokemon-style toy-marketing ploy, but the film is at least fairly meta about it and gives us a character who’s memorized all the stats. The Vikings are big and bulky, especially the village chief, Stoick the Vast. Stoick’s son Hiccup is a big exception though. He’s a clumsy weakling, but he does try to compensate with his brain. He builds a contraption that manages to down the most dangerous dragon breed, the Night Fury. But, he can’t quite bring himself to finish the job, and instead begins to secretly befriend the injured Fury. The rest is plot-by-numbers: Hiccup gets success from his friendship, then hits a lowpoint when he’s discovered. He argues that the war with the dragons is a misunderstanding, but he’s ignored. There’s a girl involved. There is a slightly darker twist at the end that I liked, but most of the film is fairly predictable.

That’s not entirely a bad thing in a family film though, and everything is well-executed. The voice work doesn’t really distinguish itself, except maybe Jay Baruchel as Hiccup, but it gets the job done. My one other complaint is that the design for the Night Fury is a little too plain, and hits a little too hard on the cute. The main dragon isn’t very cool-looking, and cool-looking dragons should be the main point here, right? The rest of the dragons are great though, and some of them get quite creative. Some of the backgrounds are also pretty amazing, and the animation is excellent. This is a very solid, family-friendly film, and I think it fits the genre slot a little more comfortably than the other computer animated film in this category. Only two of my nominees made the short list, this is one of them.

Grade: B+

1989 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1988 Saturn Fantasy – WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?

I remember how highly this film’s technical achievements were lauded when it first came out. The melding of live action and animation got lots of attention at the time. Now, it looks pretty pedestrian, and I wouldn’t quite call it seamless. The saving grace is that the filmmakers (once again, a Spielberg-backed Zemeckis directs) didn’t pass on story and simply rely on special effects. The film is actually a moderately successful neo-film noir.

Another latter-day film noir, Chinatown, is considered by many to have the best-written screenplay in movie history. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? borrows liberally from it. A troubled detective in 1930s Los Angeles investigates a seemingly simple adultery case and uncovers a massive conspiracy to reshape the developing city itself. The twist here is that, in this world, the stars of the popular cartoons of the era are real, and humans can interact with them. The detective in question, Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) has descended into alcoholism after the crushing death of his brother at the hands of a violent cartoon. He hates cartoons, but he takes a job concerning the wacky Roger Rabbit out of financial need. Roger’s wife Jessica plays a risqué game of pattycake with the head of the Acme corporation, who ends up dead the next day. Roger is the obvious suspect, and the dreaded Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) is ready to erase him from existence. Roger takes refuge with Eddie, who must now clear the silly cartoon’s name by delving deeper into the Toon community.

As I suggested before, the effects have not aged well into the era of digital effects. And, I can’t help but feel like the movie could be a lot funnier. Roger Rabbit is just downright annoying and cameos by the likes of Daffy and Donald Duck provide most of the cartoon laughs. Still, the plot and script are pretty effective, even if they are knock-offs of a much better film (Chinatown is about as good as it gets – if you haven’t seen it, rent that first), and I actually liked the juxtaposition of some fairly dark material, and lots of sexual innuendo, with silly cartoons. There are even a few musings about the legal and social status of cartoons that make this halfway interesting as speculative fiction. It's worth a look, even if it probably won for the wrong reasons.

Grade: B+